Juan Torres — Associate Laboratory Director, Energy Security, Resilience, and Integration

Juan Torres serves as the associate laboratory director for energy security, resilience, and integration at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

He oversees NREL's research on power systems engineering, energy security, cybersecurity, and energy systems resilience. This work supports the lab's goals to advance technologies and systems to improve the nation's evolving grid infrastructure, strengthen energy systems against the rise in global threats from both natural hazards and human threats, and accelerate the transition to energy systems that are secure, resilient, reliable, affordable, and clean.

Torres is co-chair for the U.S. Department of Energy's Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium, a partnership of 14 national laboratories to advance modernization of the U.S. power grid. He also co-leads the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) research platform. ARIES is the nation's most advanced platform for energy systems integration research and validation. It is designed to support and accelerate the nation's transition to a decarbonized electric grid.

Torres has provided congressional testimony on several occasions. In 2021, he testified on Lessons Learned From the Texas Blackouts: Research Needs for a Secure and Resilient Grid, called by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. In July 2019, Torres spoke before this committee's Subcommittee on Energy about modernizing and securing our nation's electricity grid. And in 2018, he provided testimony to the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on the topic of blackstart, the process of returning energy to the power grid after a systemwide blackout.

Prior to joining NREL in 2017, Torres served in a variety of technical and management positions throughout his 27-year career at Sandia National Laboratories, most recently as deputy to Sandia's vice president for energy and climate programs. At Sandia, Torres led research efforts and vulnerability assessments in cybersecurity, guided research in advanced microgrids and renewable energy, and led the security and resilience team under Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium efforts.

Torres holds a bachelor's degree in electronics engineering technology from the University of Southern Colorado and a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of New Mexico and has completed additional graduate work in management science and engineering at Stanford University.